Then there’s Phil Gramm, the screeching heavy metal in what was once the stately opera of presidential politics. As soon as word leaked that Quayle would not run, Senator Gramm was out and about. For the cameras, he got right to the point. “I think many people who would have supported Dan Quayle will be inclined to support me,” he said. Gramm was the first to hit CNN with a sound bite – only hours after the Quayle news moved on the wire.
On the facts, Gramm was wrong. The first national polls showed that Dole, the best-known name in the field, for now had picked up most of Quayle’s support. But though Dole is the front runner for 1996, the insider buzz of the moment is all about Phil Gramm. He may never win the nomination – the first votes, after all, are a year away – but he’s already set the tone, tempo and terms of the coming presidential campaign.
Focused, relentless, unforgiving: that’s Gramm and the environment he helped create. He’s kingpin of the modern Texas Republican Party, the wealthy home base of the new GOP. In the Senate since 1985, chief of its campaign committee from 1990 to 1994, he’s been running flat-out for the presidency since the day after George Bush lost in 1992. His Mad Max approach has given him the most money in the bank, troops in the field, straw-poll victories and endorsements in hand. Usually it’s dark horses who run this hard this early. This is no dark horse. Next week his Dallas kickoff is expected to gross $4 million.
The discipline in mechanics is matched in message. Through 20 years in politics and 10 teaching economics, Gramm has honed himself into a master of the tart New South sound bite: angrily antigovernment, scornful of Ivied elites, cutting as a mouthful of shark’s teeth. He’s best known for the budget measures that he helped write and that gave him the reputation – not really deserved – as a fierce downsizer of government. With Quayle out of the race, Gramm is the major candidate with the most legitimate claim to the exalted status of True Believer. The core of his conservatism is economic, but he’s pro-life enough for the demanding Christian Coalition. At last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Gramm won the straw poll.
Gramm’s quick start, combined with the 1996 timetable, dictate the new order of battle. The nominating season will be a Hobbesian grind: nasty, brutish and short. Seventy percent of GOP delegates will be selected next February and March. A candidate who wants to compete, or so the theory goes, must raise $20 million. Dole and Lamar Alexander moved up their timetables to do so. The new rules scared away Quayle – and also Bill Bennett, Dick Cheney and Jack Kemp before him. Other names will surface now, and most will make the same call. “You have to be committed one hundred and ten percent each day,” Quayle said. He wasn’t.
Gramm is. He’s the modern essence of campaign striving, with Nixon’s guile, LBJ’s glands and Reagan’s note cards. But Gramm also reflects those men in less palatable ways. He has Nixon’s charm, Johnson’s hunger for campaign cash and Reagan’s regard for inconvenient facts. The nakedness of his ambition is refreshing to some, but off-putting to his Senate colleagues. The studious detachment that makes him a cleareyed tactician alsomakes him cold to the touch and dry at a podium. He jokes about his homely visage, which has been compared to a turtle without the shell, E.T.’s granddad and Darth Vader with the helmet off. But he insists that a winning candidate won’t have to be liked – just “admired.” The voters will soon see if he can be either.
He’ll also have to deal with “Gramm-standing” – his habit of saying one thing and doing another (chart). Gramm wields a meat-ax rhetorically, but uses a scalpel on actual budgets and hauls pork to Texas with a Johnsonian flourish. He adores the market and loathes the government, yet he’s lived on government checks most of his life. He’s a hawk on defense but chose not to follow his father and older brother into military service.
Gramm’s main claim in politics is that he can “connect with working people,” as he told Newsweek. He’s the only candidate with a working-person mascot, a printer from Mexia, Texas, named Dickey Flatt whose tale he told at the 1992 GOP convention. Gramm’s bid to lead Flatt’s America is valid enough – he has two convincing Senate victories in Texas to prove it. “A lot of it is cultural,” he says.
Indeed, Gramm’s cultural roots are certifiably “working people” – today’s log cabin. His upbringing in Columbus, Ga., eerily echoes that of the nation’s other leading Southerners, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton. William Philip Gramm’s mom, Florence Scroggins, was a country girl from Alabama, a practical nurse, divorced and remarried. Gramm, born in 1942, was an army brat. His father, a Yankee, was in the infantry at Fort Benning, Ga. In 1944, Kenneth Gramm suffered a heart attack and stroke, leaving him an invalid until he died in 1956. Like Clinton and Gingrich, Gramm was ruled by mother and grandmother.
Gramm’s ear for precise speech and dreams of glory came from the books his father, who had never finished high school, read aloud to him as a boy. Even now, Gramm says, phrases from those books come unbidden into his mind. On important matters, aides say, he wants to be briefed orally, not on paper. He was a late and slow reader, preferring makeshift science experiments and rabbit hunting to school. Smart but rebellious, he flunkedthe third, seventh and ninth grades, eventually making up the work in summer school.
Money was an obsession, then and now, and the government was an indispensable – and, perhaps, therefore irritating – aid. His father got a veteran’s disability check and was in and out of VA hospitals until he died. Every month, Gramm says, his stepbrother Don had to choose “which bills we could pay.” When the family decided to send Phil to a military academy (where he righted himself as a student), they used his War Orphan’s benefit to do it. In graduate school, he had a federal scholarship.
Instead of making money, Gramm studied it. He learned laissez faire at the University of Georgia, where he was taught by disciples of conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter. Gramm turned populist – and political – when he went to teach at Texas A&M. In 1972 he told a faculty friend, James Miller (later a high-ranking Reagan official), that he wanted to run for Congress. His first move was an op-ed piece. In 1973, at Miller’s suggestion, Gramm published an article in The Wall Street Journal denouncing federal oil-and-gas regulation. As a result, he hit a gusher of Kiwanis Club invitations and, eventually, campaign money. Gramm’s been on a quest for campaign cash ever since, first as a conservative Democrat, then, after he switched parties in 1983, as a Republican.
Had he gone hunting a fortune, Gramm might have ended up a country-club Republican. Instead he’s become a symbol of the new Republican elite. They’re well-educated (even professorial) believers in the power of ideas and scholarship to rescue private enterprise – and yet with a taste for chicken-fried steak and a delivery out of “Mayberry R.F.D.” He and his wife, Wendy Lee Gramm, whom he met when he recruited her to teach at A&M, are certified intellectuals – both hold doctorates in economics. But this is a different ivory tower. They honor Smith and Friedman, not Keynes and Galbraith. Wendy, a third-generation Korean-American, is a Wellesley grad (just like you know who) and a former federal regulator (the enemy) and serves on corporate boards, among them State Farm, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Iowa Beef Processors.
These days, the Gramms don’t live Dickey Flatt lives. They’ve made a comfortable Washington career out of attacking the city that is their principal home. They own vacation property in nearby Maryland and Virginia and sent their two sons to one of the most socially liberal private schoolsin town. If GOP primary voters wantan outsider, Gramm – angry rhetoric and all – may not be their man. But if sheer determination is enough to be “admired,” – and therefore nominated – Phil Gramm is well on the way.
